Receptionists are the initial point of contact between a company and external parties. Receptionists greet visitors, facilitate meetings between visitors and office personnel, accept deliveries, direct traffic, provide answers to some questions, and locate appropriate personnel to answer other questions.
Receptionists, however, cannot be everywhere at all times. A business can have multiple points of ingress and egress, operate from multiple suites, or operate from multiple buildings on a campus. Having a receptionist at each such location is impractical while funneling all traffic to a receptionist at a particular location is inconvenient and inefficient.
Intercoms and cameras extend the reach of a receptionist, but cannot extend the ability of the receptionist to assist more than one person at a time. Thus, if the receptionist is answering telephone inquiries, occupied by one visitor at their desk, or not at their desk, other visitors will be made to wait regardless of whether they are at the front desk, on the telephone, or communicating through an intercom or camera.
Human receptionists also cannot be all-knowing. Human receptionists may not know all visitors and deliveries coming to a business in a given day, let alone, over the course of a week or more. Similarly, human receptionists may not know every individual of a business, let alone, where those individuals are or what those individuals are doing when a visitor comes looking for them. This lack of knowledge hinders how quickly and how accurately the human receptionist can perform the multitude of receptionist functions.
The presence and knowledge shortcomings of human receptionists grow as does the company. Company growth goes hand-in-hand with more office space, more office personnel, more visitors, more deliveries, and more inquires implicating more company inter-dependencies. The growth demands more receptionists with greater knowledge of the company and its inner-workings. To offset such demand, there is a need for a receptionist that is all-knowing of a business and everywhere within a business at all times. In other words, there is a need for a digital or virtual office receptionist that can assume the functions of several human receptionists with the same simple human-to-human interactivity.